Absorbent articles such as sanitary napkins, pantiliners, disposable diapers, incontinence products, and bandages are designed to absorb and retain liquid and other discharges from the human body and to prevent body and clothing soiling.
A need that occurs in the manufacture of absorbent articles is to provide the absorbent article with more complex three dimensional shapes in an effort to more closely fit the wearer's body. In the past, a number of efforts were made to create body-conforming articles.
One way to provide an absorbent article with a body-conforming shape, for instance a triangular cross-section for a sanitary napkin, was often to stack elements on top of one another. Examples of such structures are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,340,058 issued to Pierce, et al. on Jul. 20, 1982, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,490,147 issued to Pierce, et al. on Dec. 25, 1984. Stacking materials to form three dimensionally-shaped absorbent articles suffers from the drawback that it is very difficult to carry out on high speed manufacturing processes. This is due to difficulties encountered with registration and differences in extensibility of the materials (which are usually supplied in continuous form) that are stacked. That is, it is difficult to maintain such materials in the precise degree of alignment with respect to each other that is necessary for stacking. If continuous webs have different cross-sectional areas, the webs with the smaller cross-sectional area will tend to stretch more in such a process under the same amount of force than will webs having a larger cross-sectional area.
Other efforts involved molding the absorbent article, or an element thereof into a body-conforming shape. One such effort is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,197,959 entitled "Absorbent Article" issued to Buell on Mar. 30, 1993. The search for improved body-conforming absorbent articles, and methods for making the same, has continued.
Thus, a need exists for absorbent articles with complex, body-fitting shapes that do not involve stacking elements of various shapes different from the shape desired, or molding an element, in order to form an absorbent article of the desired shape.